The need for rich metadata is necessitated by the growth of data loss, Government regulation, application of new access control methodologies and the need to have policy based decisions on information management. The current state of the art solution using limited Name Value Pairs leads to organizations having to scan the content and in turn guess to a large extent the sensitivity of the document. As well, the document format itself may not be conducive to scanning since it may be in a non-parsable binary form or encrypted in some way.
The sharing of information across company departments, with partners and governmental bodies requires that the metadata associated with the information be consumable by the recipient in a form they are expecting. This includes:                Native language of recipient        Metadata schema expected by the recipient        Data format of the metadata when received by recipient        The applicability of portions of metadata schema may be influenced by values already associated with hierarchical assigned values, dynamically provided values and the context of the metadata values.        The totality of a system wide metadata schema may not be applicable to every application of the schema.        
Metadata itself is often described as data about data. The metadata schema is the fundamental representation of the relationships amongst the metadata items, the associated values, the context the metadata is applied to and the inherent operational characteristics intrinsically applied within the schema. The ability to manage, classify and organize this data is becoming increasingly complex with the exponential growth of data available.
Accordingly, methods and systems that enable hierarchical metadata management remain highly desirable.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.